Entrepreneur Magazine wrote a great article this week about what Startups need to know about SEO. What I like about this particular article is their brutal honesty in calling out some of the common misconceptions about SEO.
Many business owners and founders still make the mistake of assuming SEO to be an offshoot of web development. Understand that SEO is an inseparable and ongoing part of marketing. It is much more than adding titles and meta descriptions to your web pages or getting a “writer” to post articles to your blog twice a week. (Source – Entrepreneur)
One key point they make that I find people still become easily fixated on is links. Yes, backlinks are great, but they sure aren’t as great as they used to be. I built my first website in 1996 and I can still remember being able to rank better just by repeating a word more times than my competitor or cross-linking between sites.
Those days are gone but people seem to have a hard time letting go. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t care about links when you’re thinking about SEO, you absolutely should, but quality backlinks alone isn’t enough.
Therefore, it is essential you don’t base your SEO strategy only on acquiring links. Instead, focus on creating wider conversations around your brand. Get people to follow and engage with you on major social media platforms. Encourage them to leave reviews and ratings for your products on Google, Facebook and other niche-focused sites. Bring on board micro-influencers (the startup’s answer to brand ambassadors) to help you increase brand awareness on various social channels. (Source – Entrepreneur)
Oh and if you want to do a deeper dive into common SEO mistakes that people make, I highly recommend this article from SearchEngineLand.com.
